Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Zettelkasten Method (2019)

lesswrong.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 95 posts

Re: The Zettelkasten Method (2019)

#31

Post by mongol »

disabled wrote: post #13
mongol wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you take the course?

Absolutely not. But, I am really good at catching other people's plagiarism, including people who make entire livings off of such grifts. This course has a lot of obvious red flags of that, and I am curious where the original material came from in Creating a Second Brain. This is one example of me finding some severe plagiarism where someone makes an entire living off of it: this Language Master "course" ( https://ww…

Funny, because the course seems to be exactly about that. In his video you linked, he quoted Picasso "Good artists copy, great artists steal".

Re: The Zettelkasten Method (2019)

#32

Post by pps »

andi999 wrote: post #4

Tried understanding Zettelkasten for a while, searched the internet, bought one/some books. But it was always too light on examples. I need full beefed out examples (like a 100 pages Zettelkasten) or let's say 10 pages. Of course you can say one doesn't need it, but isn't the value of any method to be benificial if done as designed? This article seems to be the closest of having good examples.

You can see the process on videos from zettelkasten.de guy: entire playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHwtkAtdkx1IZoI7FZf1X... and something new that I didn't watch yet, but it looks like it's also walkthrough, from the other guy from zk.de: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_MJYtWr1vE

Re: The Zettelkasten Method (2019)

#33

Post by tablet »

tastyminerals2 wrote: post #30

When someone says that they used this and that technique to increase their research productivity, I always think about TRIZ and the fact that so few ppl know about it.

TRIZ is extremely hard to apply beyond engineering areas. I tried to bend it to soft.dev with no luck.

Re: The Zettelkasten Method (2019)

#35

Post by sdoering »

andi999 wrote: post #20
sdoering wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are able to read handwritten German, the whole Zettelkasten [1] of Niklas Luhmann [2] is online available. with an additional explanation of the method [3]. [1]: https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann [3]: https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/nachlass/zettelkasten

Yes, but I fear that this is actually too much Infos (and I am not interested in his field)

I strongly believe one can't understand this method and the sheer amount of effort necessary to consistently tend to this system and keep it alive (like Luhmann) did without the deep explanations and also at least diving into the examples of Luhmann's zettelkasten as it is digitalized.

Nonetheless - I also do not believe, that a lot of people would benefit from the zettelkasten system. It has in my opinion a very narrow target group that would massively benefit from this method, while for others it would only be a lot of work with limited benefit.

Luhmann profited from his lifelong work on the Zettelkasten (he was an avid reader and did extracts long before his university career). But once he started his university career he was able to produce on such a deep level and with such a high frequency, because he had up front invested massive amounts of time into this system.

So if one is looking for a productivity tool, I am not sure that zettelkasten is the right tool in one's belt. It needs massive investment up front and pays interest only later.

Re: The Zettelkasten Method (2019)

#37

Post by lkois »

bodge5000 wrote: post #21

Time for the daily/weekly/monthly note taking and productivity thread! On a serious note, I actually like these threads. Earlier in the year I decided to look into better note taking and task management, and it became an entire month of me gradually becoming more and more stressed about it. HN was actually a great source for this, mostly because a lot of the people on here seem a bit less "into it" than dedicated sou…

I've found the perfect notebooks for me are A5 spiral bound dot grids. Fairly compact size, unintrusive binding. The dot grid forces less structure than lined, but isn't the wild west of blank.

A few months ago I also looked into a bunch of note taking methods, even bought a similar A5, spiral bound, pre-formatted organizer and thought it'd be perfect for organizing my days. It remains unused except for a couple of lines where I began to note the days tasks, then crossed them out and tried to start again the next day.

But a dot grid purchased around the same time is filling up very quickly with odd chicken scratchings of work notes. The only hint of structure are dates scrawled wherever I happened to be starting from that day. Any very important things get circled or marked with an asterisk

Re: The Zettelkasten Method (2019)

#38

Post by orzig »

chelmertz wrote: post #27
WA wrote: post #9

The verbosity around Zettelkasten baffles me. It is a simple system, but most posts explaining it are like 5,000 words long.

Try reading the GTD book. What could have been a flowchart, maybe bundled with some potential downsides/gotchas-and-how-to-avoid-them, somehow became this nonsense 300-page sleeping pill.

I liked the abridged audiobook FWIW

Re: The Zettelkasten Method (2019)

#39

Post by ceilingcorner »

WA wrote: post #9

The verbosity around Zettelkasten baffles me. It is a simple system, but most posts explaining it are like 5,000 words long.

People like creating systems more than they like implementing them. Hence the popularity of military strategy books as compared to the number of real generals.

Re: The Zettelkasten Method (2019)

#40

Post by arkitaip »

gexla wrote: post #14
WA wrote: post #9

The verbosity around Zettelkasten baffles me. It is a simple system, but most posts explaining it are like 5,000 words long.

Seems like we see this everywhere. Bob is highly productive and comes up with a "system" which he uses to be productive. Bob probably would have been productive with any other system, he's just a productive guy. Joe reads Bob's book and picks up this system thinking he'll be just like Bob. The story ends with Joe giving up on his dreams and taking a day job entering data into spreadsheets. Bob was smart though, he ma…

lol there actually ate zettlekasten consultants out there. The same type of people who teach you how to develop a second brain...
Post reply on HN